


Neuroscience Showdown

by PictoJournalist



Series: AdriNath August (my favorite month of the year) [6]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: (yes i made a sister for nath), Adrinath August, Competition, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-07
Updated: 2017-08-07
Packaged: 2018-12-12 06:14:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11731167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PictoJournalist/pseuds/PictoJournalist
Summary: For AdriNath August Day 6, RivalsAll Nathaniel wanted was for his sister to forge their mother's signature so he could pretend she saw his latest progress report. Instead, he has to face off against local boyfriend and science whiz Adrien Agreste to prove he's able to get his grade up if he tries.





	Neuroscience Showdown

Ariel sucked in a breath after reading the folded-up paper her younger brother handed her. “Yikes.”

“Yeah, yikes,” Nathaniel groaned, setting his head on the table. “That’s why I was hoping, you know, would you…?”

“I’m not forging mom’s signature for a progress report that looks like this, Nath,” Ariel interrupted, shaking her head slowly. She shifted the paper back to him.

Nathaniel sat back up and tried to give the paper back, but Ariel kept one hand planted on the table in front of her while the other pushed her too-long, brunette bangs away from her face. It was clear she wasn’t budging. “Ellie, please?” he begged. “Just this one time. I can get my grades up before report cards get sent out.”

“How are you planning on doing that? I know Ms. Mendeleiev doesn’t accept late work, and most of these are just missing assignments.”

“Well…” Nathaniel thought, setting the paper down and frowning. “I’ll just get the homework done from here on out, and I’ll do better on the in-class stuff. There’s a test coming up… this Thursday, I think? If I get a high enough score, even if I don’t do the homework, I’ll at least get a grade mom won’t _ground_ me for.”

“And if you don’t, you’re going to get grounded twice as long for hiding stuff from her.” 

“I can do it! Just… if I promise, will you sign the progress report?”

Nathaniel held his breath when Ariel didn’t immediately respond and still looked as unimpressed as she did before. A moment passed, and Ariel finally sat forward with a sigh. “Isn’t your boyfriend, like, really good at science? I’m surprised your grades didn’t boost any since you guys got together.” 

He shrugged. “We tried studying once or twice, but we just kept distracting each other. He’s learned all this stuff before, probably, so he doesn’t even have to study.” 

“Well, here’s an idea.” 

Ariel took the progress report from Nathaniel’s hand, and he instantly brightened. 

“Hang on, don’t get too excited, I’m not signing it yet.” 

He deflated again. 

“I’ll take it, but you have to make a deal with me. First, you’re going to get today’s homework done, and I’ll help if you _really_ need me to, but I know you and I know you can do it. Sound fair?”

Though Nathaniel wasn’t quite sure what Ariel was going for, he nodded anyways.

“Good. Second, you’re going to give me a copy of your review guide for that test you were talking about earlier. Third, when Adrien comes over after school tomorrow, first thing you’re doing is a review challenge against him. All based on the review guide, no misleading questions, nothing you haven’t seen before. If you do all that and win the review challenge, I’ll sign the progress report. If you miss just one of my requirements, I’m giving it straight to mom. Deal?”

Ariel held out her hand, and Nathaniel paused, but eventually followed suit and gave his sister’s hand a firm shake. “You’re lucky I don’t have to have it signed until next week,” he grumbled.

“I’m only looking out for you, brother dearest~” Ariel singsonged as she stood and flourished out of the living room with the progress report in hand.

* * *

“Okay! Rules of the game!” Ariel announced, handing a rubber duck to each boy sitting at the kitchen table. “I’m going to read a definition, and if you want to answer, squeeze your rubber duck. I’ll stop reading as soon as your duck squeaks. If you answer correctly, you win a point. If you’re incorrect, the other person can guess and steal the point. Any questions?” 

“Uh, yeah,” Adrien admitted, staring at the purple duck in his hand. “What exactly are we doing trivia on and what brought this on all of a sudden?” 

“Oh, Ariel’s making me play against you to make sure I studied for the neuroscience test tomorrow,” Nathaniel answered, yawning and setting his blue duck on the table, “I forgot to tell you.” 

Ariel smirked. “In other words, he made sure not to tell so you wouldn’t be studied up before the big game.” She reached across the table to ruffle Nathaniel’s hair, to which he batted her hand hand away with a tiny noise of frustration. 

Looking up from the rubber duck and toward Nathaniel who was still trying to fix his hair, he chuckled. “Now that doesn’t sound fair at all, does it? Well, you’ll be happy to know I haven’t studied _recently_ , but maybe not so happy to know I’ve worked with it quite a bit while I was homeschooled.”

“Oh, don’t look so smug yet, Agreste,” Ariel teased, “I saw Nath studying until at least 2 in the morning, and if the bags under his eyes say anything, he studied _hard_.”

“You seem biased toward my competition, Ellie. Can I call you Ellie?” 

“You’re at about a level 8 acquaintance, and you need to be a level 10 to call me Ellie, so you’re close, but no.” 

“Can we start already so I can take a nap once this is all done?” Nathaniel interrupted their playful spat.

“I’m not sure, Nath, I love you and all, but I don’t think I can enter this game with fair conscience if the host is clearly biased toward one of us.”

“Oh, you wish,” Ariel rolled her eyes, smirking one last time before reading over the card. “Question one: in what two main areas of the brain does neurogenesis—?” 

Adrien squeaked his duck, Nathaniel startled out of his sleep-deprived daze, and Ariel looked over at him expectantly. “The hippocampus and olfactory bulb.”

“How in the _world_ do you know that off the top of your head,” Nathaniel whispered as Ariel marked a point for Adrien. 

“I just guessed,” Adrien teased, and he even had the audacity to _wink_ after that. Nathaniel loved his boyfriend and all, but this game was only one question in and turning from _I need to win to save myself from my mom’s wrath_ to _I need to win to wipe that sly look of his face and throw it to the **ground**._

Ariel flipped to the next notecard. “Which kind of brain scan involves injecting—?” 

Nathaniel squeezed the duck so much that the squeak it omitted startled the other two. 

Before Ariel could even acknowledge his squeaked duck, he began reciting at double-speed, “A positron emission tomography, or PET scan, is where the subject is injected with radioactive chemicals which travel through the bloodstream into the brain to measure sugar glucose levels in generalized areas across the brain, and if I don’t get at least an extra half-point for explaining all that, I’m calling this game _rigged_.” 

Adrien could only stare, dumbfounded, but Ariel stared Nathaniel dead in the eye as she drew a singular point on Nathaniel’s side of the score sheet. Nathaniel shot out of his seat in a rage.

“ _Oh, come on!_ ”

“I explained the rules already, brother dearest, and there’s no takebacks on the rules,” Ariel stated calmly while flipping to the next flash card.

* * *

This game was _completely_ rigged, Nathaniel decided as he grit his teeth and Ariel wrote in another point for Adrien. 

The game had been going on for the better part of a half hour, Ariel constantly getting interrupted in the middle of a question by one of the two competitors to fill in the rest of what she wanted to say and _then_ get around to answering the question. It had been neck-and neck the entire time, the points never far enough away to estimate an overall winner.

Adrien, at some point, got in on the outrageously competitive spirit. His posture had changed so his full body leaned forward in his chair with his eyes locked on Ariel and hand ready to squeeze the life out of the rubber duck. He also got extravagant in his responses as he even cited case studies and research related to each of the key terms. (Ariel still never gave either of them any extra points for extra explanation.) 

“Alright, we’re down to the last two questions, and the score is 53 to 52 with Nathaniel in the lead,” Ariel reported after counting the tallies, and Nathaniel would have certainly whooped in victory if it wasn’t for the fact that he was still in deep competitive mode and didn’t have to worry about the possibility of losing. “If he gets this last question right, the game is over. Okay, question 106: which lobe of th—” 

Adrien squeaked the duck. “The occipital lobe, which holds the primary visual cortex, processes and comprehends visual information. In the case that the occipital lobe were to—” 

“Point to Adrien,” Ariel cut off and wrote it down, then set down the pencil and narrowed her eyes at the blond. “Did you look at the flashcard or something? There’s no way you could have gotten that right with the information you had.” 

“You already asked questions about the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes, so it only made sense occipital would be last.” 

“Fair enough. Okay, that’s 53 to 53, whoever wins this wins it all. Ready?” 

Both boys nodded, Adrien sitting up even more as Nathaniel cut off his nod at a single raise of his head, narrowing his eyes at his sister and grasping his duck so hard that he felt his wrist locking up.

“Which kind of neurons carry information away from the—?” 

Prematurely, Nathaniel’s duck squeaked. Nathaniel himself nearly died right there, his face paling as his sister looked back at him. 

“Have your answer, Nath?” 

“I didn’t mean to squeeze it,” Nathaniel tried to defend himself, but Ariel just shook her head with a smirk. _I explained the rules already,_ he could almost telepathically hear her boasting. 

“I’ll give you thirty seconds,” Ariel said, leaning back in her chair.

Crap. Okay, so he knew there were two options based on the way she said it: afferent or efferent neurons. Afferent went from the senses to the spinal cord, efferent went from the spinal cord out to create movement. He _knew_ one of them had already gotten asked before, but he couldn’t remember which. He had to think back, use a strategy and fast—

“Efferent,” he blurted out before he could think. 

“...Is that your final answer?” Ariel asked, hushed. 

Oh god, he hated when Ariel did this. Most would think that having a sibling around for their entire life would be enough time to figure out if second-guessing questions like these were meant to be secret code for “do it” or “don’t do it.” Not Ariel. She switched it around constantly, and it annoyed him so bad. If he wanted to win, he needed other clues, he needed to think back to earlier in the game. 

_Actually, no he didn’t,_ he realized when he thought to look right to his side. 

Adrien was still sitting forward in his seat, but he was looking at Nathaniel expectantly and his vision darted between him and Ariel. Nervous energy radiated through him as if his entire life depended on Nathaniel getting the question wrong. If he’d remembered what lobes of the brain they’d already covered in the game, he most certainly remembered which brand of neurons they’d gone over, too. And Adrien, bless his soul, could act when he wanted to most of the time. Not under this kind of competitive stress.

“Efferent,” Nathaniel repeated, “final answer.” 

Ariel smiled, then marked the winning point onto Nathaniel’s side. 

The room exploded with noise as Nathaniel jumped up from his seat and cheered for his own victory while Adrien screeched with disbelief, partly about how many extra half-points he would have gotten if Ariel had just molded the rules, and another part simply about how Nathaniel won out of pure luck. Ariel had left at some point between the chaos, saying something about leaving the progress report on the desk beside his bed.

Within a few minutes, both boys finally relaxed enough to sit back in their chairs again, contented sighs and leftover chuckles escaping them. 

“I hope you know you just saved me from getting grounded,” Nathaniel said between some comfortable silence, “so thanks. I never studied so hard for anything in my life.” 

“I’m glad I could do that for you,” Adrien smiled gently, taking Nathaniel’s hand and briefly pressing it to his lips. “I hope you know how much it stings for me to get beat in a game about _science_ of all things.”

Nathaniel squeezed Adrien’s hand. “Hey, you didn’t even study. That took me _hours_ to get. You definitely would have won if you’d studied even a little.” 

“Yeah, and I studied it privately for months not all that long ago. I have no excuse, and I’ll gladly accept losing to you.” 

“Would you gladly accept losing to me again in the future?” 

Adrien turned to look at Nathaniel. “Are you implying you want to do this again?”

“Well, maybe with someone who accepts half-points next time, but yeah.” 

“Then I accept. Except the losing part, because there’s _no_ way I won’t study next time.” 

“You’re on, science boy.”

**Author's Note:**

> Alright guys, I think I still have yet to post any day of AdriNath August before midnight of the day, whoops. But, yes, I technically made an OC for this story! CloudWeaver/FoxyThief and I have been discussing the idea of Nathaniel having siblings, and now we sort of have joint custody of Ariel, the ironically not redheaded sibling. We also have another Nath sibling planned, coming eventually in either (or both) of our stories~


End file.
